


Extraction - A Division-Era Doctor Who Story

by kkthedoctor



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Doctor Who References, Spoilers for Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children, Thirteenth Doctor Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:07:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23132896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kkthedoctor/pseuds/kkthedoctor
Summary: Long before the Doctor ever took up the mantle, long before the blue box, long before the sonic screwdriver, there was a lost sole trapped in service to The Division.This is a tale from that era - introducing a new incarnation of the Time Lord who will one day become the Doctor, as alluded to in the Series 12 finale.
Kudos: 2
Collections: Doctor Who Fanfics





	Extraction - A Division-Era Doctor Who Story

It’s funny how when a lifetime’s worth of work is reaching its conclusion, one almost seems to slow down, stretch out the final few minutes and seconds and relish in the anticipation. Ruker Tam had devoted his life to this idea, and the idea of it functioning right here, right now in front of his eyes in his workshop was sending his heart rate through the roof. People had always leant on the word ‘scatty’ as the best way to describe his persona, and in this moment he was the embodiment of it – unkempt greying hair brushed aside by a hand already too busy adjusting the next wire connection, or scribbling in his lab notebook. Not that scatty was an entirely fair description, intelligence shone through his sparkling though tired blue eyes, and the masses of devices piled on the shelves lining the walls of the concrete shed told the stories of his success.

But this one was the one. The one that would change everything.

He took a step back, and a deep breath to go with it. In front of him on the worktop was a metal box held together with rivets, a meter long in each direction, with a latched door currently swung open to reveal the circuit boards, electrical cables, capacitors and transistors carefully assembled inside. They all spilled out of the back and across the counter, most of them connected to the desktop processing unit whose screen was scattered with codes awaiting the big moment to spring into action. Life’s work. Yikes.

And so he did it. Ruker slammed the hatch shut on the box and drummed the enter key on his keyboard with a wince. It was an anti-climax really. The device was essentially silent, and devoid of the dramatics of flashing lights which some of his colleagues often felt compel to utilise. The only way to know if it was working would be to open the box. To do so actually took him close to a minute – his hand danced around the latch until eventually the urge swept up through his body, and he clicked it open and threw the door aside.

A gasp. Maybe even a tear slightly collecting within the creases of his eye. He smiled.

When he had first explained his concept of transdimensional engineering to a seminar twenty two years before, they had laughed at, derided and mocked him. And yet here it was in front of him – a box a meter long in each direction on the outside, but entirely different within… He leaned in close to examine the five meter wide cavernous space which now resided within the box. A separate but now entirely connected space, made possible by the magic of science and 22 years of dedication. He had made it. And it worked!

Bang!

As quickly as the box had worked, it stopped doing so. Ruker was drowned in a shower of sparks which erupted from it, and flames began to sear their way out of the rivet holes in the box. The space inside, so large only a second before, faltered and folded and disappeared from sight, replaced with the melting, burning remains of the components which had made it exist. Adrenaline kicked in, and he turned to grab the fire extinguisher from by the door. But he couldn’t get to it. It was blocked by a figure holding a gun pointed directly at the box.

The woman lowered the gun, but kept it clenched in her gloved hand as she made eye contact with him with piercing green eyes. He took a moment to absorb what he was seeing, though he couldn’t quite understand her. A woman of young appearance but an unknowable, powerful presence. She was mostly clothed in black, a sort of loose military garb consisting of a long coat draped disdainfully over her shoulders, a tattered jumper and combat trousers, boots coated in mud and scrapes, and numerous buckles, straps and pouches strapped to her. She wore a vibrant blue scarf around her neck though, and through holes in the jumper seemed to shine through some kind of psychedelic swirl of colours, all somehow at odds with the rest of her dark garb. Her face, though youthful, seemed tired and beaten, dark bags hung under her eyes, a cut barely healed shone crimson on her lip, and her expression was tensed into a hard, shielded glare.

Ruker tried to muster words. But she stole the silence and took possession of it.

“Any other prototypes?” Her voice was confident and unyielding.

“What?” 

His voice was quivering, with confusion just as much as fear.

“Prototypes. Where?”

She stepped forward and closely into his personal space, but kept the gun at her side.

“That was the only one.”

Her face twitched. Not into a smile exactly, more like her very subconscious had imagined but rejected a smile in the space of a nanosecond.

“Don’t look like such a lost puppy. You’ll be fine.”

She strode past him, and started pulling data drives and notebooks off of the shelves, making a rough pile in the centre of the room. Her work done, she raised her gun and fired several shots, causing the pile to ignite in a rainbow of colours as it decomposed in front of their eyes. Or Ruker’s at least, she seemed to have turned her gaze away when she pulled the trigger.

“Backups?”

“None.”

A nod, then a flurry of blasts at his desktop processor. A life’s work combusting before his eyes, lost forever.

The gun was immediately holstered, and from a pocket she pulled a small, spherical device which began to tick as she flung it over her shoulder onto the floor.

“Time to go.”

Ruker didn’t have a say in this, she had grabbed him by his collar and dragged him through the doorway before he had chance to respond. He lost his footing and fell onto the soft, orange grass as the workshop erupted behind them, spilling the withered and shattered chars of its contents across the precinct. He gazed upwards, and was met with the woman kneeling down to meet him. She opened her mouth to say something, with an expression that was perhaps the slightest percent softer than she’d borne before, but she was interrupted. People were spilling from the buildings around them and gasping, shouting out to them.

The stranger rolled her eyes and muttered some kind of curse under her breath, before sweeping him up with a forceful forearm pressed crushingly into his throat. For a moment, her grip was unyielding, he could barely move a centimetre despite her appearing to be slim and being shorter than he was. Then she released him. Threw him forward. Pulled out the gun. Fired directly into the back of his skull. Ruker could barely even feel a thing as his body atomised in front of the horrified crowd. And then everything went black.

**

When you die, the last thing you expect to do next is wake up. Ruker could hardly believe he was, as he sheepishly cracked open his eyes to see his surroundings. He was strewn over a chair, a battered old leather armchair with its blue finish peeling off in patches. So he had a body, a body that still worked and could still sit up! Strange. Relieving, but strange. He was in a hexagonal chamber, dimly lit but with a deep indigo hue permeating around its corners and from the circular recesses which burrowed into the angled walls. The room was cluttered, random crates were stacked in a chaotic fashion all around it, and in the centre sat some sort of computer bank.

It was hexagonal too, adorned with buttons, switches, levers and dials. A cylindrical column bobbed up and down in the centre of it, containing some sort of instrumentation which seemed to emit a low humming wheeze which bounced around and brought all of the surfaces into a slight vibrating life. There were a pair of boots visible propped up on the other side of the computer bank, and as he stood up from his chair he met the solemn gaze of their owner, reclined in an identical chair with her legs lazily propped up against the controls.

“Where am I?”

The woman pulled a face, exacerbated at the question before she had even answered it. She quickly stood up, brushing away the mud her boots had left on the console. She shrugged. 

“Far away from home.”

Home. The place she had just killed him and destroyed his life’s work. The word seemed to ignite an angry put polite irritation within him.

“Why did you destroy everything? My life’s work! I’d been working on that for…”

“Twenty two years. Any time you told anyone about it they didn’t believe it was possible, but the science was sound. And you just had to prove it.”

“So WHY destroy it??”

“Because I was told to, alright? Because it’s my job.”

She seemed fed up, bored even, of this conversation already, and started busying herself at the controls. Ruker charged over to her.

“What kind of job is that? And then you killed me! Is that your job too?”

She scoffed, and stood up straight, staring him down again.

“You’re not dead, we wouldn’t be stood here talking if you were dead!” 

She took her gun from her holster, held it by the barrel and waved it in front of his face.

“I fitted a bypass on the energy converter, added a triangulation cell, and then linked an upload signal to my ship. All activated by this switch on the grip. Best way to do it without anyone noticing what happened.”

“Wait… Matter transmission?”

“Yup. Don’t tell anyone, they’d be very pissed off about it.”

With that she threw the gun on top of one of the crates in disdain and walked around the console. Matter of fact though she was, maybe underneath whatever exterior character this was there was some kind of heart? Not that he remotely understood why she had done what she did. 

“Who are you then? Dropping out of nowhere carrying out this job of yours, blowing up workshops and staging assassinations? What’s it all for?”

“If I had friends, they would call me Theta. But I don’t, and you wouldn’t be one of them, so don’t even try it. So cut all the questions, we’re here.”

The ambient sound in the room started to become louder and louder, a thundering groan which shook them to the bones and then suddenly vanished into silence as the column ground to a halt. Theta gestured towards one of the exits to the room and marched out. He had no choice but to follow her coat tails. Through a small antechamber, and out they emerged into dazzling sunlight and a soft grey-blue sky. They were on a hill, surrounded by a sparse scattering of ancient trees and overlooking a small town consisting of primitive wooden buildings with columns of smoke billowing from their chimneys.

Ruker turned on the spot to see the ‘ship’ he had just emerged from. But there wasn’t one. The door he had just stepped out of belonged to a small, wooden hut built from a dark, knotted wood, with a candle lit lantern hanging above the doorway. He peeked back through the door, through the antechamber into the part of the room they were previously in. All still there, all contained within this small, basic façade. Bigger on the inside. Dimensionally transcendental. Just like his experiments. He turned to confront Theta, but again she seemed to steal the moment a mere nanosecond before he could speak.

“Welcome to the Fourth Moon of Standekkah. About ten galaxies over from yours. Quiet, insignificant backwater. These people live their lives working agriculture all day and rolling dice in the tavern all night. Seems like a decent life, no?”

She was looking at him expectantly, and in those seconds it clicked what she was trying to tell him.

“No! What? I’m not staying here! I want to go home!”

“You can’t.”

Cold. Matter of fact. So detached from the panic he was feeling in his heart right now.

“I have a LIFE. You can’t do this. I’ll find my way back…”

He turned to run back into the hut, in the hope he could slam the door, pull a lever and find himself back in his city, on his planet, where he belonged. But he was instantly countered, her reactions were lightning fast. The door was slammed in his face, and then he was spun about to be slammed up against it. Her forearm was pressing firmly into his throat, in such a way that he was fighting for breath but not deprived of it. Her expression had ignited, and her words were spat out with a painful rage that he felt shaking up through her arm.

“Look, lost puppy. There are people, up there in the sky, WAY beyond your imagination, who want you DEAD. They call themselves Time Lords, and let me tell you right now that they are doing the very best to earn that title. They have technology beyond the dizziest daydreams of most of the universe, but their problem is that people like YOU are competition. You threaten their superiority by taking away their competitive edge, and for doing that they want you OBLITERATED from the surface of the universe. The Division work in the shadows, send their nastiest bastards to do the dirty work, and the Time Lords sit sipping their wine, safe and secure and righteous in their Citadel. Those people wanted you dead for what you had discovered.”

She released her grip, and threw him on the ground towards the town. She was breathing heavily, calming down slightly, into a quiet and stern tone.

“Luckily for you they sent me. I’ve done what I can for you, and I’m sorry but that is the best I can do. Go live a quiet life. Enjoy being alive instead of dead. Don’t draw attention. Because next time you might not be so lucky.”

And with that she marched off, becoming within seconds a dark silhouette passing over the crest of the hill. 

**

Ruker spent hours upon hours walking through the winding lanes of the town, it seemed days were a lot longer here than at home. The sun beat down heavily as he explored this new place with as open a mind as he could muster. It was humdrum, but peaceful. People went about their business in their shabby cloth garments, waving hello and smiling from seemingly every direction. Inside some of the buildings were huge mills, with burly men lugging flour about and heaving the grinding wheels into motion. In others were quaint shops, filled with trinkets and basic foodstuffs.

As promised, plenty of taverns were dotted about, containing mercurial old folk regaling stories of days gone by. Apparently it wasn’t unusual for a stranger to turn up in town, there were towns like this dotted all across the plains and people enjoyed migrating from one to the next from time to time. According to an old soak called Mal, anyway. Talking to Mal and others like him, Ruker saw a society ready to welcome him, work always on offer with no question, and bunks for rent all over town for only a few coins until one could afford something more substantial.

This really wasn’t the sort of place he would have ever imagined himself, and he ached for home with all of his heart. But whenever he did, his mind turned to the Time Lords. Some kind of unknowable terror breathing on the back of his neck from the shadows. Remembering Theta’s furious warning made his blood run cold to think about it. Maybe a quiet life would be better, better than that fear. He had worked hard for all these years, maybe using his skills to do some tinkering and invention for these townsfolk would be better? It didn’t sit completely comfortably, but it felt somewhat inevitable.

Eventually night began to fall; the sun was sinking in the sky and painting great brushstrokes of orange and red across it. Some moons seemed to blink to life in the sky, concurrent with the burning lanterns hanging across the district. He sat himself on a bench at the edge of town, and stared off into the countryside, intent on taking a few moments before finding a bed for the night. On the horizon, however, he spotted something. A lone figure sat at the crest of the hill, facing towards the sunset’s mesmerising light show. He felt the urge to go and see her, to try and peel back more layers of this enigma who was sat watching the sky. 

It was a quick but tiring trek up the hill from town, and as he reached the crest of it his breath was taken away by the masterpiece being painted before his eyes over the rolling emerald hills. He approached his fellow observer, sat with her knees huddled into her chest, and sat himself down beside her.

“Beautiful spot you’ve found here.”

“You seem to still be lost, town is that way.”

“Oh, I know, don’t worry. I’ve done my exploring.”

“So you’ve come here to change my mind?”

“No.”

She seemed surprised at this, and raised an eyebrow at him before turning her eyes back towards the view.

“I thought you would have left by now. You’re only here for the job aren’t you?”

She shrugged.

“They won’t miss me for a few hours. I like to take in a view.”

“So it’s not all blowing things up and throwing scientists around then?" 

“For them it would be. It’s like they take in the universe with their eyes closed. Everywhere at their disposal and they never look.”

This side of Theta was softer, if still quite miserly. She seemed to carry an invisible weight on her shoulders, as if sitting here watching a sunset was the only happiness she had. In this state it seemed if it was sadness which radiated from her rather than anger.

“So how come you do it? Couldn’t you quit?”

She scoffed at that.

“The Division chooses you, you don’t choose it. No walking away. Besides, what would happen to the idiots like you who stick their head above the parapet? Maybe I can do more good on the inside. So long as they don’t know about it.”

“Well that makes you a good person then. And, for what it’s worth, I’m grateful.”

Theta was taken aback by this. The confusion seemed to paralyse her for a moment, until for only a split second her characteristic tension released and a partial smile broke through. The moment held only briefly, but Ruker hoped that perhaps it had helped. They sat in mutual silence after that, watching the sun dive through the sky until it vanished behind the furthest hill. The valley was plunged into darkness, making vision only possible via the faint scattered warmth of the town from a distance away.

Theta took a deep breath, absorbing the fragile serenity of this moment, burning its rare tranquillity into her memories. Then she heaved herself up from the cold ground, and turned on her heels to walk away.

“You could save yourself one day, you know. If you can hide their targets from them, why not hide yourself? Grab a few more sunsets.”

She didn’t respond, and seemed to be walking away, until suddenly he felt a hand firmly squeeze his shoulder.

“Unfortunately impossible. I appreciate the thought though. Good luck, Ruker Tam.”

And with that, she was gone. She disappeared down the hill, and as Ruker sat absorbing the stars glimmering in the night sky, a distant rumble and groan of engines echoed its way up through the ground, until it grew quieter and began to weave its way up in amongst them. And then, like the night sky, it fell silent.

**Author's Note:**

> Though the revelations from the series 12 finale, The Timeless Children, haven't been universally loved, I felt hugely inspired as soon as I heard them. I had a strong vision of what a version of the Doctor who isn't quite the Doctor as we know them yet would look like, and how someone who is the same being as the Doctor would cope as an agent of this ruthless Division we know so little about. So that's how this little fic and the character of Theta came from - a character who is abrasive and closed off, harbouring a lot of anger, and bitter at the duty she must carry out, but also kind, using her intelligence to save innocent lives from the Time Lords, and stealing short moments to enjoy the wonders of the universe.
> 
> Thanks for taking the time to read it, and I hope at least some people will take enjoyment of this new character from this new corner of the universe. :)


End file.
